Josh Ackley

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The people who called AIDS God’s punishment for gays are helping measles make a comeback

MAGA, MAHA, or whatever we’re calling a cult of people determined to drag America back to 1830, is having another banner year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last Friday that the U.S. currently has the largest number of measles cases we’ve seen in 35 years, and it comes amid a dramatic slide in childhood vaccination rates. Maybe it’s time to bring back the covered wagons and live in simpler times when 40 percent of all children failed to reach adulthood. We’re well on our way. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, it was impossible to escape the hatred and hostility hurled […]

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Viktor Orbán won’t be the last anti-LGBTQ+ strongman to topple

One of the world’s most openly homophobic and misogynistic leaders just lost power. Viktor Orbán is out. For years, Orbán, as prime minister, held up Hungary as proof that a country could be tightened, simplified, and brought under control — a place where national identity came first and anything that complicated it could be pushed out. That message did not stay in Hungary, it moved, was studied, repeated, and turned into strategy by political movements that wanted the same kind of power. A sitting prime minister stands in front of an international conservative audience, calls liberalism a virus, lays out a governing formula built on […]

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Christian nationalism’s role in the war with Iran — and U.S. LGBTQ+ rights

On Saturday morning, in the southern Iranian city of Minab, an airstrike struck a girls’ elementary school shortly after classes began. Rescue workers spent hours digging through the collapsed building. By the end of the day, between 165 and 180 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. The strike was part of a widening military campaign carried out jointly by the United States and Israel against Iran, a conflict that has already spread across multiple countries and killed hundreds of civilians. Events like this should force a moment of moral clarity. The deliberate or reckless […]